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Frieze: Blackness and Post-Cinema: John Akomfrah and the Otolith Group in Conversation

By John akomfrah and The Otolith Group

During the turbulent summer of 2020, the filmmakers met to discuss contemporary filmmaking and decentring the human

John Akomfrah: The post-cinematic does not involve a rejection of cinema – it’s steeped in insights and knowledges and affinities with the cinematic tradition – but it clearly wants what Althusserians would call an ‘epistemological break’ with its practices.

Anjalika Sagar: I think of the post-cinematic in terms of evocation rather than explanation and effects more than causes. Post-cinematic affect allows a more complex relationship to multiple non-narratives that contribute to not-yet-articulated structures of feeling.

Kodwo Eshun: For me, it’s not only a question of screens or phones or apps. What’s useful about the term post-cinematic is its agnosticism towards narrative. It’s a way of stepping away from narrative. In the UK, cinema carries with it this imperative to narrate the nation. There is an unspoken expectation, whenever a Black British film is released, that it will tell the untold story of Black Britain. To me, the post-cinematic side-steps this cruel optimism of cinema. [Laughs] It implies an unspoken promise to open up an imaginative dimension of post-cinematic Blackness.

Read entire article here: https://www.frieze.com/article/blackness-and-post-cinema-john-akomfrah-and-otolith-group-conversation